Lisa Nakamura
@lnakamura.bsky.social
3.9K followers 540 following 150 posts
Researcher and prof. Writing about race, gender and internet stuff since 1995. “The Inattention Economy: How Women of Color Built the Internet” forthcoming from U. Minn press in 2026. Lisanakamura.net for articles if you want.
Posts Media Videos Starter Packs
Reposted by Lisa Nakamura
ali-alkhatib.com
it's less "AI drives people to kill themselves" and more that "tech companies do it, and are indifferent about it". and, bleakly, some journalists seem determined to convince you that the focal point of this story is a high point of engineering rather than a low point of humanity
I know that the prizes aren’t perfect, white men dominate them, etc but the general idea still stands. As a researcher I have a sense of what it takes to see a project through and I have 1/10000 the stamina of these people. That’s the facts.
The news is a shitshow and we live in a fascist state. When I want to feel better I read this list of scientists, writers, activists who got up every day and got on that grind, often for 20+ years, because they wanted to. www.nytimes.com/article/nobe...
What to Know About the 2024 Nobel Prize Winners
www.nytimes.com
“El Conejo Malo” will now always think of him this way even though I don’t know Spanish. Love him too.
gabriellehecht.bsky.social
See I’m here to say something similar.

No such thing as “too old” for el conejo malo. I’m 60 and just bought tix for his Santo Domingo show. I know an 82 yo woman who loves his music
binki666.bsky.social
I love bad bunny and I’m a 75 year old grandma
Yay David! So well deserved!
Reposted by Lisa Nakamura
ianboudreau.com
I'm not a big fan of Jack Dorsey but I have to admit that one of his better ideas was, instead of getting into posting wars with users, he would go off to a yoga castle and eat hallucinogens for two weeks
Reposted by Lisa Nakamura
wendyxu.bsky.social
social media was a mistake and if we have to talk to ppl on the internet let it be on forums
yeeeerika.bsky.social
i don't want to hear your most boomer complaint. what's your most millennial complaint?
Reposted by Lisa Nakamura
danielagabor.bsky.social
speaking of political assassinations, today we denounce again the dark beginning of neoliberalism, the assassination of Salvador Allende in Chile, a military coup backed by United States.

'The U.S. spent $8 million on covert actions between 1970 and the 1973 coup'.

www.npr.org/2023/09/10/1...
The U.S. set the stage for a coup in Chile. It had unintended consequences at home
When the U.S. role in the 1973 coup in Chile became known, activists took action. So did U.S. lawmakers. This is what happened after the U.S. helped topple a Marxist and aided a right-wing dictator.
www.npr.org
I can’t lie, I’ve done this more than once.
lukesteuber.com
Doin good fam! Nice and rested. Anyway, what’s new?
Text that says: “Me announcing to my friends who are planning their weddings and careers that I finally got 8 hours of sleep:” Below is an image of Margot Robbie dressed in a bright pink western outfit and cowboy hat, smiling widely with her arms outstretched as if making a grand entrance, while seated people look at her.
VERY surprised by this. I assumed that intellectual property theft was intrinsic to the gen AI business model. It still is but now it costs a little.
wired.com
WIRED @wired.com · Sep 5
JUST IN: Anthropic has agreed to pay at least $1.5 billion to settle a lawsuit brought by a group of book authors alleging copyright infringement.

That’s at least $3,000 for each copyrighted work that it pirated—well below what Anthropic may have had to pay if it had lost the case at trial.
Anthropic Agrees to Pay Authors at Least $1.5 Billion in AI Copyright Settlement
Anthropic will pay at least $3000 for each copyrighted work that it pirated. The company downloaded unauthorized copies of books in early efforts to gather training data for its AI tools.
www.wired.com
Casio is good taste and the watch of choice among Buddhist poc in my experience. He knows the code.
Replacing human moderators with ai is glossing over the real issue here: toxic content comes from a systemic disinvestment in care, equity, and fairness. Traumatizing humans or using ineffectual ai just kicks the can down the road. Not news.
TikTok to replace trust and safety team in Germany with AI and outsourced labor
TikTok workers in Berlin are striking over mass layoffs amid company’s global push to replace moderators with AI
www.theguardian.com
Really really good, some of the best thinking on infrastructure out there! Especially the piece on water by my colleague Tung-Hui Hu that suggests we think about AI as we do government: just another infrastructure, not an impenetrable inevitability
msteinbrg.bsky.social
Incredibly excited: In/Convenience: Inhabiting the Logistical Surround is now out!!! 4 years in the making, co-edited by @joshua-neves.bsky.social and me, this OA volume is full of chapters that will make you rethink the oft-used word. Please read & circulate!

networkcultures.org/blog/publica...
TOD #54 In/Convenience: Inhabiting the Logistical Surround
Theory on Demand #54In/Convenience: Inhabiting the Logistical SurroundEdited by Joshua Neves and Marc SternbergConvenience is the feeling and aspiration that animates
networkcultures.org
Got copy edited text of my book manuscript The Inattention Economy: How Women of Color Built the Internet and boy what a luxury it is to see it cleaned up so nicely. I love copy editors so much.
Thanks for posting this! Life @parismarx.com and @bcmerchant.bsky.social ‘s work. New version of this article with oral history interviews with Navajo workers coming out in my new book The Inattention Economy this fall!
yanbasque.com
This NYT story was mentioned on System Crash by @parismarx.com and @bcmerchant.bsky.social. There's a long racist history of references to "nimble fingers" to justify exploitation. See "Indigenous Circuits: Navajo Women and the Racialization of Early Electronic Manufacture" by @lnakamura.bsky.social
References to "nimble fingers" as a digital resource appear in many accounts of how women of color were understood by and actively recruited to work in the electronics industry in this period. As Jefferson Cowie writes, the "nimble fingers" phrase was applied to Latino women working in maquiladoras for RCA and other electronics firms, including Fairchild. According to Karen Hossfeld, by the eighties in Silicon Valley, electronic assembly had become not just women's work but women of color's work.
I was about to share the same story. I think we knew this was coming.
Reposted by Lisa Nakamura
rev-avocado.bsky.social
just buy some Spanish language radio stations I'm fucking begging you
teddyschleifer.bsky.social
NEWS:

Democratic mega-donors are debating plans to spend tens of millions of dollars on a range of influencer plans to "find the liberal Rogan."

We've got pitch decks, investor meetings, and internal docs.

One Democrat has a spreadsheet of 26 different proposals.

www.nytimes.com/2025/05/20/u...
Democrats Throw Money at a Problem: Countering G.O.P. Clout Online
www.nytimes.com
He gave such great feedback on the indigenous circuits work, on account of him being a real media historian vs what I do. His validation meant so much to me and everyone he knew. Thanks, @askjerseth.bsky.social I always taught him too.
This one took me over ten years to write. It's not long because unlike my dear friend Jonathan Sterne, may his memory be a blessing, I like to get in and out in a hurry. But I put my heart into every chapter and I tried sincerely to make it not-boring. Maybe 80% of it was cut at some point.
My book ms "The Inattention Economy: Seeing the Digital Labor of Women of Color” is in production at the University of Minnesota Press. So grateful to Anne Carter and Leah Pennywark at UMP. It's a book about how the work of digital infrastructure became women of colors' work and thus invisible
I left it all on the field today.
Right wing academic trolls are showing up in our events. Today during a panel of indigenous scholars talking about their research a Zoom participant asked whether they had to sign Conflict of Interest (COI) statements before researching their communities to prevent "biased results." Was speechless.